E-mail programs, such as Microsoft Outlook™ and Lotus Notes™, allow one to administer an out-of-office message that is sent to e-mail senders while the person is out. In Outlook™, the user must remember to enable the message before he or she departs, and, in Notes™, the user can schedule the time during which the application will send the message.
Similarly, voice messaging systems, such as Avaya Modular Messaging™, allow a user to set up an “I cannot answer now” greeting. In some systems, a greeting can be scheduled.
Personal information managers, such as Microsoft Outlook™, provide calendar, task, and contact management, note taking, journal ability, and e-mail service. It can be used as a stand-alone application but can also operate in conjunction with Microsoft Exchange Server™ to provide enhanced functions for multiple users in an organization, such as shared mailboxes and calendars, public folders, and meeting time allocation.
E-mail applications, voice messaging systems, and personal information managers are not converged so that out-of-office messages are linked to electronic calendar entries.
Today, the average person has multiple communications tools, such as a wired telephone, mobile telephone, Personal Digital Assistant or PDA, personal computer, and laptop computer and numerous messaging vehicles, such as voice mail, e-mail, text chat, and instant messaging. The proliferation of communication tools has created a need to manage them. For example, a separate out-of-office message must be configured for each separate communication tool/vehicle.
Although there have been suggestions to automated generation of out-of-office messages using templates bound to a trigger event. Each template includes data indicating the type of triggering event for which the template should be selected, such as “busy” and “out-of-office” indicators and keywords or codes detected in the calendar. However, in such systems the user has no ability to customize the greeting by device or communication source. Moreover, the greeting is triggered by a calendar entry but it is not part of the entry. In other words, the greeting is generated using rules.